I don't care to look it up so I'll just ask, is there any software for the Panther? Controllers even?

to my knowledge ,there is a prototype system and a developement system..... 3-4 games exist that i heard of,all of which are Jaguar titles.

Yep, Cybermorph was a port to the Jaguar from the Panther... and it shows.

If Cybermorph is an example of what the Panther had to offer, I'm glad they chose to go with the Jaguar.

Hey it could have gone like this...

"And then in 1993 Atari was working on two game systems, the 32 bit Panther, and a 64 bit Jaguar. The Panther was slow in development, and the 64 bit Jaguar was actually ahead in progress, but Atari wanted to release a system more in step with the market with cheaper production costs.

The delayed Panther was released into the market with marginal success. It's graphics capibilities were impressive for the time, but not enough to compete with already existing and successful Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo systems which won over by sheer number of games. Soon the 3D0 came out, leaving Atari's Panther in it's cat tracks.

Sadly, the Atari Jaguar was a promising system, with a unique graphic and sound chip and would have displayed millions of colors, but with the results of the Panther the Jaguar never saw the light of day, caged in an Atari office until Atari was sold to JTS. Only a few Jaguar prototypes have been found since. It's two games, a ported Cybermorph from the Panther system and Trevor McFur show only glimpses of what could have been in this last Atari system."

Yeh, if I was to have a last Atari system, I'll take the Jaguar any day!!!

Leonard was kind enough to scan this in and share it via TXG/MNX - figure I would add it here as well since a lot of people aren't in the FB groups. GPU specs and Leonard makes it very clear that the Blossom video chip from the ATW800 has absolutely nothing to do with the Panther.

I hope I'm not going too far off topic, but can anyone tell me why this is the best image we have of the Panther production sketch??

Is that real?? How are we sure? Where did it come from?

It's laughably amateur, I hope there's a story behind it. It looks like kids concept art that was submitted for a video game magazine competition back in the day. It's just so strange to know that this piece of hardware got far enough to have prototype hardware but the only sketch exists on a napkin. Anyone know what's going on here?

If it actually came out, I could see the Panther claiming top prize in 'Ugliest Consoles of all Time' lists.. ugh...

I hope I'm not going too far off topic, but can anyone tell me why this is the best image we have of the Panther production sketch??

Is that real?? How are we sure? Where did it come from?

It's laughably amateur, I hope there's a story behind it. It looks like kids concept art that was submitted for a video game magazine competition back in the day. It's just so strange to know that this piece of hardware got far enough to have prototype hardware but the only sketch exists on a napkin. Anyone know what's going on here?

If it actually came out, I could see the Panther claiming top prize in 'Ugliest Consoles of all Time' lists.. ugh...

There's always this, even if incorrectly referenced as a 64-bit system:

Leonard was kind enough to scan this in and share it via TXG/MNX - figure I would add it here as well since a lot of people aren't in the FB groups. GPU specs and Leonard makes it very clear that the Blossom video chip from the ATW800 has absolutely nothing to do with the Panther.

from Curt Vendel (Cvendel@aol.com)
(Atari Historical Society's virtual Atari museum):
The Atari Panther was going to be Atari's original video game console system before the Jaguar, it was a kludged combination of the Atari ST and the Transputer Blossom video card. I have the spec's for the Panther and it was a horrible piece of junk

from Curt Vendel (Cvendel@aol.com)
(Atari Historical Society's virtual Atari museum):
The Atari Panther was going to be Atari's original video game console system before the Jaguar, it was a kludged combination of the Atari ST and the Transputer Blossom video card. I have the spec's for the Panther and it was a horrible piece of junk

There seems to be multiple different stories, some probably created by media outlets at the time. 16-bit system, 32-bit system, 16-bit chip with 32-bit internals. It's a mess.

Leonard mentioned it had nothing to do with the ST (unless you count the 680000 but that doesn't really count) and didn't use the Blossom video chipset. He also mentioned that there were no working Panther chips yet we have at least 7 development kits floating around. Turns out it was a misunderstanding and he said while the development kits work, they don't work as intended with unstable video and a huge hardware bug, something Minter mentioned as well and having to force reset the hardware. They had hoped one of the developers would find a way around the bug but that never happened.

You're right though, specs are pretty bad for its time as well. You would've been better off with a re-packaged STe as a console in my opinion but knowing Atari, it would have shipped with no RAM.

From the UK Press i collected, it was always known as a 16 bit machine, just one that on paper was a SNES Killer..

Then Atari's angle was that they wanted to leapfrog the 32 bit generation completely and here was the Jaguar, which would do just that.

Curt sadly doesn't name a source for his specs, so it's hard to say what information and from where, he referee to in that quote.

The hardware bug sounds like the one Jim Gregory of HMS referenced...

The divide-by-zero issue, that he and another developer reported and he recreated in code, but Leonard apparently refused to believe..

HMS having 1 of the earliest development kits..be interesting to see if the Psygnosis kit suffers the same overheating issues..

The lack of Ram issue on Panther is often mentioned, but Atari ignored warnings from the Bitmap Bro that the Falcon lacked enough RAM and Peter Moyne ux etc warned them the Jaguar needed more as well..

So yes, i could easily see Atari releasing the Panther with the same issue and blaming developers not the hardware.

from Curt Vendel (Cvendel@aol.com)
(Atari Historical Society's virtual Atari museum):
The Atari Panther was going to be Atari's original video game console system before the Jaguar, it was a kludged combination of the Atari ST and the Transputer Blossom video card. I have the spec's for the Panther and it was a horrible piece of junk

Yeah, Leonard approached me perhaps 2 months ago asking. I had posted that info up, man like 97-98' - Info was highly erroneous from a former Atari employee and this was well before I had begun to ship out the palettes of documents I had saved from 1196 from CA out here in NY to begin to research.

Blossom is 1,000% incorrect. I had deleted the data from Atari Museum well over 10 years back, but unfortunately the misinformation had propagated out to other sites :-(

Someone just recently approached my on FB Messanger, not sure who is was, kind got a little uppity with me and in a semi-insulting way was practically demanding I give him the Panther dev disk images. Well despite the encounter I've been updating the Panther page (not yet public yet) on Atari Museum. I'll put up the Dev disks, the game code and other materials I've scanned and read in and put them up for everything.

Clint: Who's 3D model is that you posted? I would like to use it on Atari Museum, but I'd like to get permission and if given, who to credit, please let me know... thank you.